Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you would have noticed people are raving seriously about the new Windows Store for the new and improved Windows 8.1 Blue. There have been lots of articles about the new Store on various Tech sites that I don’t feel compelled to write another about it here. That’ll be unproductive and a waste of your time. But one thing I want to mention out is the new Recommendation feature of the Store.

As you might have read, the Store is now powered by the awesome engines of Bing. For better or for worse, we are being followed everyday by the Search Engines we use, whether you belong to Google or to Microsoft or whatever, there’s no denying it, our lives is being interpreted by these AIs (almost AI then, have it your way!). So unless you don’t use the internet, there is no denying it that these machines know one thing or other about us. So, we have the advantage in this case that due to your usage and search patterns, these engines knows what it good for you. So you have recommendations of Apps that the AI think will be interesting to you.

But you may not want your patterns to be recorded, and the new Recommendation features of the new Store turned OFF, well how you do it is right there in that picture. Microsoft, worrying about your privacy as usual, has added an Option for you Tin-foil wearing conspiracy theorists to turn off machine recommendations. Not that it matters, the NSA has got your backside via PRISM, so you might as well leave the darned option ON and enjoy the discovery it brings to the Store. :-)

Rate this:

Sharing is a part of being human

Like this:

Google has agreed to stop snooping around in Canada, collecting and mining innocent people’s data.

Hurrah, you’ll probably say, but don’t rejoice too soon, because Google being a nefarious data thief have a surprise for you, they will still provide location based data by snooping data via Smartphones, and which smartphone is that? Yes! Android! the be-famed Google’s Trojan.

Just read from the source, paragraph E(Google’s future plans for its location-based services), number 45 to convince yourself that Google is a data thief! See number 47 quoted and underlined here below.

Preliminary Letter of Findings

Complaints under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (the Act)

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada initiated three complaints against Google Inc. (Google) on May 31, 2010, pursuant to subsection 11(2) of the Act, after being made aware that Google Street View cars had been collecting payload data from unencrypted WiFi networks during their collection of publicly broadcast WiFi signals (service set identifiers [SSID] information and Media Access Control (“MAC”) addresses.

The three complaints are as follows:

Google’s collection, use or disclosure of payload data was done without the individual’s prior knowledge and consent;

Google’s collection of payload data was done without prior identification of the purposes for which personal information (PI) was collected;

Google’s collection of payload data was not limited to that which was necessary for the purposes identified....

E. Google’s future plans for its location-based services45. Google still intends to offer location-based services, but does not intend to resume collection of WiFi data through its Street View cars. Collection is discontinued and Google has no plans to resume it. 46. Google does not intend to contract out to a third party the collection of WiFi data.47. Google intends to rely on its users’ handsets to collect the information on the location of WiFi networks that it needs for its location-based services database. The improvements in smart-phone technology in the past few years have allowed Google to obtain the data it needs for this purpose from the handsets themselves. 48. Although it has no tracking tool to keep records of a customer’s locations (and does not intend to create one), Google acknowledges that it does need to examine the potential privacy concerns of this method of collection.

I just pity anyone using Google’s products, a company that will sell their mothers to get to you private data. Good luck people, you’ve been warned!